Abstract
Existing climate data for Bolivian Amazonia rely on observations from a few sparse weather stations, interpolated on coarse-resolution grids. At the same time, the region hosts numerous indigenous groups with rich knowledge systems that are hitherto untapped in the quest to understand local climate change. Drawing on an empirical dataset of climate change observations by an Amazonian native society, we assess the potential use of indigenous knowledge for complementing available climate data. We find indigenous observations to be robustly associated with local station data for climatic changes over the last five decades. By contrast, there are discrepancies between gridded climate data and both indigenous observations and local station observations. Indigenous knowledge can be instrumental to enhance our understanding of local climate in data-deficient regions. Indigenous observations offer a tool to ground-truth gridded descriptions of climatic changes, thereby making adaptation strategies more robust at local scales. We contend that the use of indigenous knowledge could help to assist the climate interpolation process and address the prevailing uncertainties in local assessments of climate change.
Similar content being viewed by others
References
Adger WN, Arnell NW, Tompkins EL (2005) Successful adaptation to climate change across scales. Glob Environ Chang 15:77–86. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2004.12.005
Alexander C, Bynum N, Johnson E, King U, Mustonen T, Neofotis P, Oettle N, Rosenzweig C, Sakakibara C, Shadrin V, Vicarelli M, Waterhouse J, Weeks B (2011) Linking indigenous and scientific knowledge of climate change. Bioscience 61:477–484. doi:10.1525/bio.2011.61.6.10
Armitage D, Berkes F, Dale A, Kocho-Schellenberg E, Patton E (2011) Co-management and the co-production of knowledge: learning to adapt in Canada’s Arctic. Glob Environ Chang 2:995–1004. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2011.04.006
Barnes J, Dove M, Lahsen M, Mathews A, McElwee P, McIntosh R, Moore F, O’Reilly J, Orlove B, Puri R, Weiss H, Yager K (2013) Contribution of anthropology to the study of climate change. Nat Clim Chang 3:541–544. doi:10.1038/nclimate1775
Berkes F (2009) Evolution of co-management: role of knowledge generation, bridging organizations and social learning. J Environ Manag 90:1692–1702. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2008.12.001
Berkes F, Colding J, Folke C (2000) Rediscovery of traditional ecological knowledge as adaptive management. Ecol Appl 10:1251–1262. doi:10.2307/2641280
Bindoff NL, Stott PA, AchutaRao KM, Allen MR, Gillett N, Gutzler D, Hansingo K, Hegerl G, Hu Y, Jain S, Mokhov II, Overland J, Perlwitz J, Sebbari R, Zhang X (2013) Detection and Attribution of climate change: from global to regional. In: Stocker TF, Qin D, Plattner G-K, Tignor M, Allen SK, Boschung J, Nauels A, Xia Y, Bex V, Midgley PM (eds) Climate change 2013: the physical science basis. Contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, pp 867–952
Cámara-Leret R, Paniagua-Zambrana N, Balslev H, Macía MJ (2014) Ethnobotanical knowledge is vastly under-documented in Northwestern South America. PLoS ONE 9:e85794. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0085794
Carslaw DC, Ropkins K (2012) openair: an R package for air quality data analysis. Environ Modell Softw 27–28:52–61. doi:10.1016/j.envsoft.2011.09.008
Chaudhary P, Bawa KS (2011) Local perceptions of climate change validated by scientific evidence in the Himalayas. Biol Lett-UK 11:767–770. doi:10.1098/rsbl.2011.0269
Chen J, Brissette FP, Leconte R (2011) Uncertainty of downscaling method in quantifying the impact of climate change on hydrology. J Hydrol 401:190–202. doi:10.1016/j.jhydrol.2011.02.020
Comberti C, Thornton TJ, de Echeverria VW, Patterson T (2015) Ecosystem services or services to ecosystems? Valuing cultivation and reciprocal relationships between humans and ecosystems. Glob Environ Chang 34:247–262. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.07.007
Couzin J (2007) Opening the doors to native knowledge. Science 315:1518–1519. doi:10.1126/science.315.5818.1518
Cruz-Burga Z, Reyes-García V, Nova JA, Paneque-Gálvez J, Luz AC (2013) Uso de Territorio e Integración a la Economía de Mercado. Estudio de Caso en la Amazonía Boliviana. Natura@Economía 1:105–121
Davis A, Wagner JR (2003) Who knows? On the importance of identifying “experts” when researching local ecological knowledge. Hum Ecol 31:463–489. doi:10.1023/A:1025075923297
Espinoza-Villar JC, Ronchail J, Guyot JL, Cochonneau G, Naziano F, Lavado W, De Oliveira E, Pombosa R, Vauchel P (2009) Spatio-temporal rainfall variability in the Amazon basin countries (Brazil, Peru, Bolivia, Colombia and Ecuador). Int J Climatol 29:1574–1594. doi:10.1002/joc.1791
Fazey I, Fazey JA, Fazey DMA (2005) Learning more effectively from experience. Ecol Soc 10(2):4
Fernández M, Hamilton H, Kueppers LM (2013) Characterizing uncertainty in species distribution models derived from interpolated weather station data. Ecosphere 4:61. doi:10.1890/ES13-00049.1
Fernández-Llamazares Á, Méndez-López ME, Díaz-Reviriego I, McBride MF, Pyhälä A, Rosell-Melé A, Reyes-García V (2015a) Links between media communication and local perceptions of climate change in an indigenous society. Clim Chang 131:307–320. doi:10.1007/s10584-015-1381-7
Fernández-Llamazares Á, Díaz-Reviriego I, Luz AC, Cabeza M, Pyhälä A, Reyes-García V (2015b) Rapid ecosystem change challenges the adaptive capacity of local environmental knowledge. Glob Environ Chang 31:272–284. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2015.02.001
Fernández-Llamazares Á, Díaz-Reviriego I, Guèze M, Cabeza M, Pyhälä A, Reyes-García V (2016) Local perceptions as a guide for the sustainable management of natural resources: empirical evidence from a small-scale society in Bolivian Amazonia. Ecol Soc 21(1):2. doi:10.5751/ES-08092-210102
Fernández-Llamazares Á, Díaz-Reviriego I, Reyes-García V (2017) Defaunation through the eyes of the Tsimane’. In: Reyes-García V, Pyhälä A (eds) Hunter-gatherers in a changing world. Springer International Publishing, Cham, pp 77–90
Flato G, Marotzke J, Abiodun B, Braconnot P, Chou SC, Collins W, Cox P, Driouech F, Emori S, Eyring V, Forest C, Glecker P, Guilyardi E, Jakob C, Kattsov V, Reason C, Rummukainen M (2013) Evaluation of climate models. In: Stocker TF, Qin D, Plattner G-K, Tignor M, Allen SK, Boschung J, Nauels A, Xia Y, Bex V, Midgley PM (eds) Climate change 2013: the physical science basis. contribution of working group I to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, pp 741–866
Ford JD, McDowell G, Pearce T (2015) The adaptation challenge in the Arctic. Nat Clim Chang 5:1046–1053. doi:10.1038/nclimate2723
Ford JD, Cameron L, Rubis J, Maillet M, Nakashima D, Willox AC, Pearce T (2016) Including indigenous knowledge and experience in IPCC assessment reports. Nat Clim Chang 6:349–353. doi:10.1038/nclimate2954
Fowler HJ, Blenkinsop S, Tebaldi C (2007) Linking climate change modelling to impact studies: recent advances in downscaling techniques for hydrological modelling. Int J Climatol 27:1547–1578. doi:10.1002/joc.1556
Gagnon CA, Berteaux D (2009) Integrating traditional ecological knowledge and ecological science: a question of scale. Ecol Soc 14(2):19
Garcia RA, Cabeza M, Rahbek C, Araújo MB (2014) Multiple dimensions of climate change and their implications for biodiversity. Science 344:1247579. doi:10.1126/science.1247579
Gómez-Baggethun E, Reyes-García V (2013) Reinterpreting change in traditional ecological knowledge. Hum Ecol 41:643–647. doi:10.1007/s10745-013-9577-9
Gómez-Baggethun E, Corbera E, Reyes-García V (2013) Traditional ecological knowledge and global environmental change: research findings and policy implications. Ecol Soc 18(4):72. doi:10.5751/ES-06288-180472
Harris I, Jones PD, Osborn TJ, Lister DH (2014) Updated high-resolution grids of monthly climatic observations—the CRU TS3.10 Dataset. Int J Climatol 34:623–642. doi:10.1002/joc.3711
Hawkins E, Sutton R (2009) The potential to narrow uncertainty in regional climate predictions. Bull Am Meteorol Soc 90:1095–1107. doi:10.1175/2009BAMS2607.1
Herman-Mercer NM, Matkin E, Laituri MJ, Toohey RC, Massey M, Elder K, Schuster PF, Mutter EA (2016) Changing times, changing stories: generational differences in climate change perspectives from four remote indigenous communities in subarctic. Ecol Soc 21(3):28. doi:10.5751/ES-08463-210328
Hijmans RJ, Cameron SE, Parra JL, Jones PG, Jarvis A (2005) Very high resolution interpolated climate surfaces for global land areas. Int J Climatol 25:1965–1978. doi:10.1002/joc.1276
Hopping KA, Yangzong C, Klein JA (2016) Local knowledge production, transmission, and the importance of village leaders in a network of Tibetan pastoralists coping with environmental change. Ecol Soc 21(1):25. doi:10.5751/ES-08009-210125
Houde N (2007) The six faces of traditional ecological knowledge: challenges for Canadian co-management arrangements. Ecol Soc 12(2):34
Huanca T (2008) Tsimane’ Oral Tradition, Landscape and Identity in Tropical Forest. Imprenta Wagui, La Paz
Hulme M (2011) Meet the humanities. Nat Clim Chang 1:177–179. doi:10.1038/nclimate1150
Huntington HP (2011) Arctic science: the local perspective. Nature 478:182–183. doi:10.1038/478182a
INE, Instituto Nacional de Estadística (2012) Censo Nacional de Población y Vivienda 2012. Instituto Nacional de Estadística, La Paz
Janif SZ, Nunn PD, Geraghty P, Aalbersberg W, Thomas FR, Camilakeba M (2016) Value of traditional oral narratives in building climate-change resilience: insights from rural communities in Fiji. Ecol Soc 21(2):7. doi:10.5751/ES-08100-210207
Joseph R, Smith TM, Sapiano MRP, Ferraro RR (2009) A new high-resolution satellite-derived precipitation dataset for climate studies. J Hydrometeorol 10:935–952. doi:10.1175/2009JHM1096.1
Kay AL, Davis HN, Bell VA, Jones RG (2009) Comparison of uncertainty sources for climate change impacts: flood frequency in England. Clim Chang 92:41–63. doi:10.1007/s10584-008-9471-4
Klein J, Hopping KA, Yeh ET, Nyima Y, Boone RB, Galvin KA (2014) Unexpected climate impacts on the Tibetan Plateau: local and scientific knowledge in findings of delayed summer. Glob Environ Chang 28:141–152. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2014.03.007
Koster J, Bruno O, Burns JL (2016) Wisdom of the elders? Ethnobiological knowledge across the lifespan. Curr Anthropol 57(1):113–121. doi:10.1086/684645
LEK Project (2015) The adaptive nature of culture. http://icta.uab.cat/Etnoecologia/lek. Accessed 9 Oct 2015
Maffi L (2005) Linguistic, cultural and biological diversity. Annu Rev Anthropol 29:599–617. doi:10.1146/annurev.anthro.34.081804.120437
Mahli Y, Roberts JT, Betts RA, Killeen TJ, Li W, Nobre CA (2008) Climate change, deforestation, and the fate of the Amazon. Science 319:169–172. doi:10.1126/science.1146961
Maraun D, Wetterhall F, Ireson AM, Chandler RE, Kendon EJ, Widmann M, Brienen S, Rust HW, Sauter T, Themeßl M, Venema VKC, Chun KP, Goodess CM, Jones RG, Onof C, Vrac M, Thiele-Eich I (2010) Precipitation downscaling under climate change: recent developments to bridge the gap between dynamical models and the end user. Rev Geophys 48:RG3003. doi:10.1029/2009RG000314
Marengo JA, Rusticucci M, Penalba O, Renom M (2009) An intercomparison of observed and simulated extreme rainfall and temperature events during the last half of the twentieth century: part 2: historical trends. Clim Chang 98:509–529. doi:10.1007/s10584-009-9743-7
Marin A (2010) Riders under storms: contributions of nomadic herders’ observations to analysing climate change in Mongolia. Glob Environ Chang 20:162–176. doi:10.1016/j.gloenvcha.2009.10.004
Marin A, Berkes F (2012) Local people’s accounts of climate change: to what extent are they influenced by the media? WIREs Clim Chang 4:1–8. doi:10.1002/wcc.199
Mistry J, Berardi A (2016) Bridging indigenous and scientific knowledge. Science 352:1274–1275. doi:10.1126/science.aaf1160
Mitchell TD, Jones PD (2005) An improved method of constructing a database of monthly climate observations and associated high-resolution grids. Int J Climatol 25:693–712. doi:10.1002/joc.1181
Monastersky R (2009) The social pole? Nature 457:1077–1078. doi:10.1038/4571077a
Muller RA, Wurtele J, Rohde R, Jacobsen R, Perlmutter S, Rohde R, Rosenfeld A, Wickham C, Wurtele J (2013) Earth atmospheric land surface temperature and station quality in the contiguous United States. Geoinform Geostat Overv 1:3
New M, Hulme M, Jones P (1999) Representing twentieth-century space-time climate variability. Part I: development of a 1961–90 mean monthly terrestrial climatology. J Clim 12:829–856. doi:10.1175/1520-0442(1999)012
New M, Hulme M, Jones P (2000) Representing twentieth-century space-time climate variability. Part II: development of 1901–96 monthly grids of terrestrial surface climate. J Clim 13:2217–2238. doi:10.1175/1520-0442(2000)013
New M, Lister D, Hulme M, Makin I (2002) A high-resolution data set of surface climate over global land areas. Clim Res 21:1–25. doi:10.3354/cr021001
Niang I, Ruppel OC, Abdrabo MA, Essel A, Lennard C, Padgham J, Urquhart P (2014) Africa. In: Field CB, Barros VR, Dokken DJ, Mach KJ, Mastrandrea MD, Bilir TE, Chatterjee M, Ebi KL, Estrada YO, Genova RC, Girma B, Kissel ES, Levy AN, MacCracken S, Mastrandrea PR, White LL (eds) Climate change 2014: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability. Contribution of working group II to the fifth assessment report of the intergovernmental panel on climate change. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge and New York, pp 775–791
Orlove B, Roncoli C, Kabugo M, Majugu A (2010) Indigenous climate knowledge in southern Uganda: the multiple components of a dynamic regional system. Clim Chang 100:243–265. doi:10.1007/s10584-009-9586-2
Pan Y, Wei G, Cunningham AA, Li S, Chen S, Milner-Gulland EJ, Turvey ST (2016) Using local ecological knowledge to assess the status of the critically-endangered Chinese giant salamander Andrias davidianus in Guizhou Province, China. Oryx 50:257–264. doi:10.1017/S0030605314000830
Potter KA, Arthur Woods H, Pincebourde S (2013) Microclimatic challenges in global change biology. Glob Chang Biol 19:2932–2939. doi:10.1111/gcb.12257
Pyhälä A, Fernández-Llamazares Á, Lehvävirta H, Byg A, Ruiz-Mallén I, Salpeteur M, Thornton TF (2016) Global environmental change: local perceptions, understandings and explanations. Ecol Soc 21(3):25. doi:10.5751/ES-08482-210325
R Development Core Team, R (2010) A language and environment for statistical computing. http://www.R-project.org. Accessed 20 April 2015
Raymond CM, Fazey I, Reed MS, Stringer LC, Robinson GM, Evely AC (2010) Integrating local and scientific knowledge for environmental management. J Environ Manag 91:1766–1777. doi:10.1016/j.jenvman.2010.03.023
Reyes-García V, Godoy RA, Vadez V, Apaza L, Byron E, Huanca T, Leonard WR, Pérez E, Wilkie D (2003) Ethnobotanical knowledge shared widely among Tsimane’ Amerindians Bolivia. Science 299:1707. doi:10.1126/science.1080274
Reyes-García V, Guèze M, Luz AC, Paneque-Gálvez J, Macía MJ, Orta-Martínez M, Pino J, Rubio-Campillo X (2013) Evidence of traditional knowledge loss among a contemporary indigenous society. Evol Hum Behav 34:249–257. doi:10.1016/j.evolhumbehav.2013.03.002
Reyes-García V, Fernández-Llamazares Á, Guèze M, Garcés A, Mallo M, Vila-Gómez M, Vilaseca M (2015) Local indicators of climate change: the potential contribution of local knowledge to climate research. WIREs Clim Chang 7:109–124. doi:10.1002/wcc.374
Reyes-García V, Díaz-Reviriego I, Duda R, Fernández-Llamazares Á, Gallois S, Guèze M, Napitupulu T, Pyhälä A (2016) Peer evaluation can reliably measure local ecological knowledge. Field Method 28:345–362. doi:10.1177/1525822X16629912
Rosenzweig C, Neofotis P (2013) Detection and attribution of anthropogenic climate change impacts. WIREs Clim Chang 4:121–150. doi:10.1002/wcc.209
Rudiak-Gould P (2014) The influence of science communication on indigenous climate change perception: theoretical and practical implications. Hum Ecol 42:75–86. doi:10.1007/s10745-013-9605-9
Ruiz-Mallén I, Fernández-Llamazares Á, Reyes-García V (2016) Unravelling local adaptive capacity to climate change in the Bolivian Amazon: the interlinkages between assets, conservation and markets. Clim Chang. doi:10.1007/s10584-016-1831-x
Satyamurty P, de Castro AA, Tota J, da Silva Gularte E, Manzi AO (2010) Rainfall trends in the Brazilian Amazon Basin in the past eight decades. Theor Appl Climatol 99:139–148. doi:10.1007/s00704-009-0133-x
Savo V, Lepofsky D, Benner JP, Kohfeld KE, Bailey J, Lertzman K (2016) Observations of climate change among subsistence-oriented communities around the world. Nat Clim Chang 6:462–473. doi:10.1038/nclimate2958
Simons DJ, Rensink RA (2005) Change blindness: past, present and future. Trends Cogn Sci 9:16–20. doi:10.1016/j.tics.2004.11.006
Smith K (2011) An army of observers. Nat Clim Chang 1:79–82. doi:10.1038/nclimate1104
Soria-Auza RW (2010) Impact of the quality of climate models for modelling species occurrences in countries with poor climatic documentation: a case study from Bolivia. Ecol Model 221:1221–1229. doi:10.1016/j.ecolmodel.2010.01.004
StataCorp (2011) Stata statistical software: release 12. College Station, Texas
Tengö M, Brondizio S, Elmqvist T, Malmer P, Spierenburg M (2014) Connecting diverse knowledge systems for enhanced ecosystem governance: the multiple evidence base approach. Ambio 43:579–591. doi:10.1007/s13280-014-0501-3
Thornton TF, Manasfi N (2010) Adaptation—genuine and spurious: demystifying adaptation processes in relation to climate change. Environ Soc Adv Res 1:132–155. doi:10.3167/ares.2010.010107
Vedwan N, Rhoades RE (2001) Climate change in the Western Himalayas of India: a study of local perceptions and response. Clim Res 19:109–117
Whipple D (2008) Breaking the ice. Nat Rep Clim Chang 2:54–55. doi:10.1038/climate.2008.38
Yeh ET (2015) ‘How can experience of local residents be “knowledge”?’ Challenges in interdisciplinary climate change research. Area 48:34–40. doi:10.1111/area.12189
Zou L, Zhou T, Li L, Zhang J (2010) East China summer rainfall variability of 1958–2000: dynamical downscaling with a variable resolution AGCM. J Clim 23:6394–6408. doi:10.1175/2010JCLI3689.1
Acknowledgements
The research leading to these results has received funding from the European Research Council under the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme (FP7/2007-2013)/ERC Grant Agreement Nr. FP7-261971-LEK to V. R.-G. M.C., Á.F.-LL. and A.P. were also supported by the Academy of Finland (Grant Agreements Nrs. 292765 and 284601), Á.F.-LL. by the Finnish Centre for International Mobility (CIMO) and R.A.G. by the South African National Biodiversity Institute and the National Research Foundation of South Africa. We thank all the Tsimane’ who shared their knowledge with us, the Gran Consejo Tsimane’ and CBIDSI for all their support, V. Cuata, S. Fraixedas, S. Huditz, P. Pache, M. Pache, and I.V. Sánchez for all their help during fieldwork, J. Nyman and P. Bottazzi for cartographic assistance, and N. Font, T. Huanca, B. Martín-López, A. Rosell-Melé, M. Tengö, T. Thornton, and two anonymous reviewers for constructive comments and suggestions to previous versions of the manuscript. We acknowledge the Servicio Nacional de Hidrología y Meteorología of Bolivia (SENAHMI) and the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) for providing climate data. Funding was provided by Biotieteiden ja Ympäristön Tutkimuksen Toimikunta (Grant Nrs. 250444 and 257686).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Editor: James Ford.
Electronic supplementary material
Below is the link to the electronic supplementary material.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Fernández-Llamazares, Á., Garcia, R.A., Díaz-Reviriego, I. et al. An empirically tested overlap between indigenous and scientific knowledge of a changing climate in Bolivian Amazonia. Reg Environ Change 17, 1673–1685 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-017-1125-5
Received:
Accepted:
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10113-017-1125-5